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Business process automation

Business process automation description/claims

Aspects of the disclosure relate to business process. More specifically, aspects of the disclosure relate to tools and techniques for enhancing business process management.

Companies have been using business process management to enhance productivity for years now. Many of these companies are driven by a desire to change business process to make their company more productive. Productivity is especially important when a business is growing in revenue and sales, but is not simultaneously hiring new employees to account for any added work. Current office tool sets are inadequate to provide employees with the productivity enhancements they need to keep up with the increased growth of activity related to their positions. In addition such tools (e.g., word processor, spreadsheet, etc.) are personal in nature and provide employees with only a limited level of productivity as it relates to collaborative activities. There is a need for tools and techniques that address shortcomings with these personal toolsets. The required enhancements cannot lead to the need for expensive software application re-installations/updates on hundred (or maybe thousands) of end user computers.

Computing that permits some basic activity-centric collaboration among multiple users is also known in the art. Although some of the current tools allow for some form of management of information, they fail to allow for automation of the process of collecting and publishing information at the employee controlled level. In general, prior systems were used to manage the volume of work (e.g., better scheduling and making information more visible), but they failed to reduce the actual volume of work (e.g., reminder sending/management, cut and paste activity, file and format conversion).

Furthermore, in recent years, legislation has heightened requirements for auditing and document management. Banks, financial institutions, consulting firms, and others are required to maintain certain protocols and procedure need systems and techniques for enhancing their ability to monitor activity on the private and public side. These requirements reduce the applicability of current software tools (word processing, spreadsheets, powerpoint) as the outputs are private in nature.

Therefore, there exists a need in the art for an innovation that enhances productivity and efficiency among members of an organization while being amenable to rigorous auditing.

Aspects of the present disclosure address one or more of the issues mentioned above by disclosing techniques for automated collaborative data gathering, monitoring that process and generating one or more report outputs. The following presents a simplified summary of the disclosure in order to provide a basic understanding of some aspects. It is not intended to identify key or critical elements of the invention or to delineate the scope of the invention. The following summary merely presents some concepts of the disclosure in a simplified form as a prelude to the more detailed description provided below.

In one embodiment in accordance with aspects of the disclosure, a method is illustrated for generating a document/report in a collaborative manner. The method includes creating data elements and activity elements, and associating the appropriate elements with events. Subsequently, when events occur, messages are sent to users to request their attention to particular tasks (e.g., the task of updating data). A report may be generated that incorporates at least some of the data elements. A template may be used to format the report.

In some embodiment in accordance with aspects of the disclosure, a system is illustrated for populating data in a memory in a collaborative manner. A lead user may create associations between various elements stored in a data store. A server computer may operate upon one or more of these elements in the data store to provide, in one example, a message-based database system. Other users, including the lead user, may be assigned responsibilities associated with one or more of the elements in the data store. The system may automatically, upon being triggered by a predetermined event, contact such users to remind them about their pending responsibilities. The various elements stored in the data store may be depicted in a tree format to assist in the visual layout of the numerous processes at work in the system.

Regarding yet another embodiment in accordance with aspects of the disclosure, one skilled in the art will appreciate that one or more of the aforementioned methods and features may be embodied as computer-executable instructions stored on a computer-readable medium and executed by a processor. In addition, a graphical user interface is described for depicting the various data elements, activity elements, and other items in a tree hierarchy with drag and drop functionality. Moreover, items in the graphical depiction may be color-coded and/or stylized to identify additional information about the status of the item/process.

The present disclosure is illustrated by way of example and not limited in the accompanying figures in which like reference numerals indicate similar elements and in which:

FIG. 1 illustrates a schematic diagram of a general-purpose digital computing environment in which various aspects of the disclosure may be implemented;

FIG. 2 shows an illustrative operating environment in which various aspects of the disclosure may be implemented; and

FIG. 3 shows an illustrative method for generating a document in accordance with various aspects of the disclosure.

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• Utility Patent

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